Robert A. Hall posted a thoughtful tome on Free Republic (read it all):

I'm 63. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked, hard, since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired.

I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic ...

I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes" ...

I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left-wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood Entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers ...

I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing ... for their family "honor"; of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers" ...

I'm tired of being told that "race doesn't matter" in the post-racial world of Obama, when it's all that matters in affirmative action jobs ...

I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must let Saudi Arabia use our oil money to fund mosques and madrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in America ...

I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate ...

I'm tired of illegal aliens being called "undocumented workers," especially the ones who aren't working, but are living on welfare or crime ...

I'm tired of latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, ... trashing our military ...

I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption ... And I'm tired of people telling me we need bipartisanship ...

I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about innocent mistakes ... when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught ...

I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor ...

I'm tired of hearing people with air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars called poor ...

I'm real tired of people who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions ...

Yes, I'm damn tired. But I'm also glad to be 63. Because, mostly, I'm not going to have to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my granddaughter.

Krauthammer's Take on Vice President Biden’s profane utterance at the signing ceremony for Obamacare ["This is a big f**n deal"]:

I think he is the man who, perhaps without intending, has given historical context to this presidency. After all, Obama sees himself as a successor to FDR and Truman, so now we have the historical procession: the New Deal, the Square Deal, and the "Big F**n Deal."

Reports from the Washington Times and Andrew Breitbart's Big Government provide video and witness testimony to disprove the claims by several Democratic black congressmen that Tea party protesters had called them "Nigger."

Joel B. Pollack, writing for Big Government described the scene involving 15,000 protesters on the west lawn of the Capital building.

The crowd was far from uniform. There were black people, white people, Hispanic people–both in the audience and on stage. One of the speakers invoked the example of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as an inspiration–and the crowd roared its approval, as it did for mentions of Thomas Jefferson and John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. A few of the speakers invoked religious sentiments about abortion. That was as edgy as it got.

At one point, the crowd to the right of the stage started to boo loudly. It was impossible to see exactly why, from where I was standing, but soon a group of people–members of Congress, apparently–ascended the stairs to the Capitol. If media reports are to be believed, that was the moment when racist and homophobic language was hurled at Rep. John Lewis, and a protestor was arrested for spitting at Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.

I don’t know why Rep. Lewis and the other members with him decided to walk right through the protesters. Did they intend to provoke the protesters? If so, few of those present seem to have taken the bait, from the video that is currently available.

The Washington Times' Water Cooler Blog adds details:

Rep. Andre Carson, Indiana Democrat, who is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, claims that "tea party" protesters hurled racial slurs at fellow CBC member Rep. John Lewis, Georgia Democrat. Mr. Carson said that "hundreds of people" were chanting, "Kill the bill," and he heard "at least 15 times" the "n – word" being thrown around.

"It just happened on the way to votes. Coming out of [the Cannon House Office Building] . . . John Lewis’ chief of staff came with us. It was just the three of us walking down the steps. 'Kill the bill, kill the bill.' . . . 'n-word' fifteen times," he said. "Capitol Police finally became aware and began protecting us."

The videos above and below were taken as Mr. Lewis and Mr. Carson walked toward a crowd of protesters, and racial epithets from the crowd appear to be absent from the different scenes captured.

A U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman said she was unaware of any law enforcement inquiry into the incidents.

Rep Emanuel Cleaver II, Missouri Democrat, who is black, claimed he was spat on by a protester. Mr. Cleaver's office reportedly said Capitol Police arrested the protester, but his office did not press charges. However, Sgt. Kimberly Schneider of the U.S. Capitol Police said in an e-mail to the L.A. Times, "We did not make any arrests today."

The Washington Times caught up with several health care bill protesters, all three of whom are black, and asked their thoughts on the allegations regarding the racial epithets.

Bill Owens Jr., a Tea Party Express leader from Las Vegas, said he did not experience or witness any racial hostility.

"I had a chance to be among these people. It's not about pigmentation. You have race issues going on all the time; however, I'm not seeing anything significant from these rallies. It's just not there," he said. "Does a person find a racist once in a while? . . . Sure, you find that anywhere. These people are concerned about the issues of where you stand, not what color you are."

Charlene Freedman, a health care bill protester from New Jersey, has been to Washington four times, since she first attended the 9/12 rally. When asked if she witnessed or heard any racial hostility from the crowd, she said: "Absolutely not . . . just well-wishers. I didn't see color. They didn't see my color. We're just American citizens, and we're here to say, 'Keep America free.' I’ve heard nothing about racism . . . nothing at all."

Jay Jarbo came to the health care protest from Atlanta and explained: "I just want to see them follow the Constitution, and they're not doing that. Anyone that tries to throw around the racial thing, just squash it, because this has nothing to do with race. I haven't heard anyone say anything about race at any one of these events," Mr. Jarbo said. "Honestly, this is the type of thing people bring up to distract from the real issues, and it's always about race in this country, and its always the last card in the deck that everyone plays."

Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn't want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all. If you don't find that terrifying, let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances. Farewell, social security! Au revoir, Medicare! The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected. If they didn't--if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission--then the legislative lock-in you're counting on wouldn't exist.

Oh, wait--suddenly it doesn't seem quite fair that Republicans could just ignore the will of their constituents that way, does it? Yet I guarantee you that there are a lot of GOP members out there tonight who think that they should get at least one free "Screw You" vote to balance out what the Democrats just did.

If the GOP takes the legislative innovations of the Democrats and decides to use them, please don't complain that it's not fair. Someone could get seriously hurt, laughing that hard.

Narcissism is the driving force among some bloggers, and Debbie Schlussel is at the head of the class. Check out her picture on her fan page above (click to enlarge) and note that: "Debbie Schlussel is the VRWC's latest and greatest sexy, blonde, and beautiful commentator." Now look at this picture with Sean Hannity.

Gawkerdoes a nice job of summarizing Schlussel's current screed against the popular conservative talk show host:

A right-wing blogger went through tax returns for Hannity's Freedom Concerts, performances to raise money for veterans and their children. She alleged that most of the money goes on lavish expenses.

The blogger, Debbie Schlussel, has some history with Hannity. In 2007 she accused him of ripping off her reporting (or something)...

Schlussel says she was acting on a second-hand tip from a friend who had spoken to a friend at Fox News and alleged that, for the performances, Hannity got the use of "a Gulfstream 5 plane to fly him and his family/entourage to the concerts; a "fleet" ... of either Cadillac or Lincoln SUVs for him and his family/entourage; and several suites at really expensive hotels for him and his family/entourage. The promoter apparently values Hannity's star demands at well over $200,000 per event."

None of this nonsense rings true with me because Sean Hannity's mega-million dollar contracts with Fox News and Clear Channel tell me that the conservative talk show host does not need to hitch rides on Gulfstreams or rip-off charities. Sean is smart enough to know that he doesn't have time in the day or an overarching financial need for such career-ending hi-jinks.

Debbie Schlussel continues to revel in the traffic increase at her website and has posted two more barely coherent entries here and here. She promises more information to substantiate her fraud claims, but the blogosphere has already found the evidence to refute her claims. The Freedom Alliance has issued this press release denying any wrong doings by the veteran's charity or by Sean Hannity. Tim Mak and Noah Kristula-Green over at FrumForum have published the real skinny entitled "Hannitized is Sanitized." Please read it all.

UPDATE: For a more "earthy" view of this kerfuffle, you need to read Lame Cherry.

Parkersburg, WV, a sleepy little town on the Ohio River with some famous political history, is home of the Bureau of Public Debt, which is directed by Obama's Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. In the olden days before the Baby Boomers began to retire, payroll deductions for Social Security were far in excess of monies required to pay our retirees. Unfortunately excess spending demands has, in the last couple of decades, been far greater than funds provided by other tax collections provided, so Congress decided to use Social Security to fund routine government operations.

Not to worry though, because the U.S has a foolproof plan to honor its commitment to fund Social Security for all qualified participants.

But to illustrate the government's commitment to repaying Social Security, the Treasury Department has been issuing special bonds that earn interest for the retirement program. The bonds are unique because they are actually printed on paper, while other government bonds exist only in electronic form.

They are stored in a three-ring binder, locked in the bottom drawer of a white metal filing cabinet in the Parkersburg offices of Bureau of Public Debt. The agency, which is part of the Treasury Department, opened offices in Parkersburg in the 1950s as part of a plan to locate important government functions away from Washington, D.C., in case of an attack during the Cold War.

One bond is worth a little more than $15.1 billion and another is valued at just under $10.7 billion. In all, the agency has about $2.5 trillion in bonds, all backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. But don't bother trying to steal them; they're nonnegotiable, which means they areworthless on the open market.

This news would be disconcerting enough, were it not for the record deficits of the Obama Administration this year, expected to exceed $1.5 trillion.

This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg.

Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors.

In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg's municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn't be worse.

The president has responded "rationally" to this crises in our bad economy by (1) promoting a second stimulus bill, (2) pushing for government healthcare with a multi-trillion dollar price tag, (3)sponsoring Cap 'n Tax legislation to make his best buddies (and eventually himself) rich and (4) setting up the destruction of American capitalism and the American way of life.

Every ten years we go through the almost ritualistic ruminations about what questions we should answer on the U.S. Census form. As Sound Politics points out:

There's four types of questions on the form. The first is the explicitly constitutional one: the number of people living there; the second is about whether those people sometimes live elsewhere; the third type is individual identification: name, phone number; the fourth is demographic information for the purposes of tailoring government programs: age, sex, gender, and home ownership.

The fourth type of question requiring release of private information not needed to enumerate the census count is where disagreement comes into play. As might be expected, the New York Times plays government mouthpiece:

To that end, questions about age, gender, race, Hispanic ethnicity and home ownership are used to help execute and monitor laws and programs that are targeted to specific groups. That is not to downplay legitimate debate fueled by questions that go beyond who is living where. Counting people by race and ethnicity, for example, is useful for enforcing civil rights laws, like the Voting Rights Act. But it also provokes argument about identity and equality in a diverse society.

Mark Krikorian over at The Corner points out that fully 25 percent of this year's census short form is taken up by questions about race and ethnicity "which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government's business."

Kirkorian specifically cites Question #9 on the census form which asks for each residents race. He believes that we should resist exposing race and answer the question thus:

Instead, we should answer Question #9 by checking the last option — "Some other race" — and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, "American" was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.

Writing in his Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer began to smell a rat in the case of sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles. Back in January he called the government recall a conflict of interest because of our governments majority ownership in GM and Chrysler. Think about it . . . the power to regulate your competitors, especially Toyota, the strongest competitor.

Warren's fertile mind connected again on the Toyota massacre when he realized that the plot currently unfolding in Congressional hearings on Toyota's supposed sudden acceleration problem reminded him of a fictional novel . . . that he himself had written.

Years ago, I wrote a novel (still available at Amazon!) wherein a key plot point was a conspiracy between a Senator, a law firm, and a media company to create a high-profile tort case out of thin air.

Today, we may be seeing something similar with the Toyota sudden acceleration case. In this case, we have the Senate calling stooges of the plaintiff’s bar as “expert witnesses” with the whole thing getting a third of the air time on nightly news programs. In my book, the whole thing was kicked off by a media company afraid of a new competitor – in this case it was kicked off by the US government, which controls GM, trying to sit on a competitor.

With the help of an unquestioning media and union thugs, Obama continues to conduct governmental policy in the great tradition of the Chicago Way by smashing opposition by whatever means available.

* First they came for the Christians, and I did not speak out—because Christians are judgmental;
* Then they came for the oil companies, and I did not speak out—because oil companies want to kill baby seals;
* Then they came for Walmart, and I did not speak out—because only rednecks shop there;
* Then they came for the “rich”, and I did not speak out—because it’s not fair for achievers to make more than I do;
* Then they came for my health care, and I did not speak out—because clearly the government does everything private industry can do — only better;* Then they came for Toyota, and I did not speak out—because Priuses are sissy anyway;
* Then they came with Card Check for all non-unionized businesses, and I did not speak out—because, you know, no company should ever make a profit, and unions can assure that;
* Then they came for all the carbon emitters [except in China and India], and I did not speak out—because the UN and Al Gore said “the science is settled”;
* Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Another Reason TV bullseye! This time the target is Obama's national plan to spend $8 billion dollars on high speed rail .

The pipe dream that is high speed rail will (1) cost too much ($500 billion); (2) will take decades to build; (3) will not relieve highway congestion, especially in cities; (4) will create more public transportation requiring tax subsidies; and, (5) will not provide a viable substitute for the automobile.